George Foreman, Boxer Turned Foreman Grill Infomercial Star, Dies at 76
The Texas-born Foreman became heavyweight champion of the world, and segued into a TV staple and pop culture icon. He was swept up in the swirl of decade-defining events surrounding Muhammad Ali as well as Joe Frazier and other high-wattage pugilists of the 1970s. In the 1980s, Foreman took advantage of the availablity of low-cost TV time to launch his Foreman Grill home grill product through a series of infomercials that he hosted.
More from Variety
'Big George Foreman' Trailer Follows the Life of the Boxer, Minister and Grill Entrepreneur
'The Masked Singer' Reveals Identities of Gopher and Venus Flytrap: Here's Who They Are
Sony Dates Whitney Houston Biopic for 2022 Awards Season, Pushes 'Lyle, Lyle Crocodile'
Foreman's family confirmed his death in an Instagram post on Friday.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by George Foreman (@biggeorgeforeman)
More to come
Best of Variety
New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week
Oscars 2026: First Blind Predictions Including Timothée Chalamet, Emma Stone, 'Wicked: For Good' and More
What's Coming to Disney+ in March 2025
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
19 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Their Huntington Theatre wedding celebrated their culture, families, and the fine art of drag
Sapan Shah was trying to spark conversation, but his date remained tight-lipped behind his K95 mask, eyes glued to the big screen. Sai Srujan Gudibandi resorted to 'non-verbal communication,' as the actor became 'The Batman.' 'He's the model movie watcher,' says Sapan of Sai Srujan. 'He would not talk to me. He would not look at me.' The Covid-19 omicron variant had the public on alert at the time, but even while masked, Sapan wanted to make the most of their first date. Sai Srujan, however, is a cinema purist: 'What if people around me say s hush or something?' They had matched on Tinder, and arrived minutes before showtime at Landmark Kendall Square Cinema in March 2022. They only exchanged pleasantries before the trailers started to roll. Post-first date, Sapan (right) and Sai Srujan continued to bond as film buffs. captures Advertisement 'It was quite the struggle — the movie, infamously, is three hours long,' says Sapan. On Tinder, they'd bonded over superhero films — 'Marvel, all the way,' says Sapan, 'but DC has its charming moments,' adds Sai Srujan — and their upbringings in India. Sai Srujan grew up in Vijayawada in coastal southeastern India, while Sapan was raised in Vadodara, out west. Both attended undergraduate engineering programs before moving to the States for graduate school. Sai Srujan was 30 at the time. He had moved Boston in 2016 for work after graduate school at Texas A&M. Sapan was 28, in his second year at Harvard Business School, and, as his Tinder profile noted: a Advertisement In addition to the communal cultural traditions and tributes in their wedding, the couple also used nods to their heritages to frame their vows. captures After the film, Sapan relayed his two-week-fresh coming out story on the walk to Lone Star Taco Bar in Inman Square. 'Basically, a lot of personal trauma dumping on the first date, which is, as we now understand, not really good practice,' Sapan says. 'But I didn't know anything.' Related : It was Sapan's first date with a man and the masks were off. 'The butterflies and giddiness went up a few notches,' Sai Srujan says. 'Trauma dumping,' it was not: 'I felt special that he felt comfortable enough to share with me.' Sai Srujan just remembers spicy margaritas and falling in love with Sapan's voice. They later walked to Sai Srujan's apartment, where he served Sapan green tea in response to a joke about Indian chai's superiority. A 'courage cup,' remembers Sai Srujan. After a pep talk with himself in the bathroom mirror, Sapan returned to the kitchen for their first kiss. Sapan (right) met RuAfza (center), a Tufts alum, through a mutual friend and had reached out via Instagram about officiating their wedding. captures On their second date at Alden and Harlow, they discussed past heartaches and Sapan reached across the table for Sai Srujan's hand. 'Up until that point I don't think I was publicly intimate with anyone, in any way, in the world,' remembers Sai Srujan. While 'a little bit uncomfortable' at first, he was glad he didn't pull away. Soon, there were gatherings with Sapan's cohort, and puzzles and dinners at Sai Srujan's apartment. They embraced their opposite natures. Sai Srujan describes Sapan as the 'biggest extrovert I've ever met in my life.' While Sapan says of Sai Srujan, 'once he's comfortable with you, he is the life of the party.' 'Meeting a thousand people in a single day is never on my bingo card,' Sai Srujan says. 'I distinctly remember we were a team against the world. ... [Sapan would] make me feel comfortable within big social spaces. And whenever my social energy was completely down, he'd say, 'Let's go.'' Advertisement Sai Srujan — an intellectual property consultant by trade, and home chef — learned how to make Sapan's favorite Gujarati dishes. Sapan told Sai Srujan that informing his parents about their relationship might be 'a challenging conversation, but I know for a fact, once my mom knows I am with someone who loves to cook and loves to feed me, she will be sold.' (Sai Srujan and Sapan's mother now exchange recipes.) The wedding's primary festivities took place in the Huntington's Maso Studio, a black box event and performance space. captures In April, on an 'I am not a dancer at all,' says Sai Srujan. 'But I remember feeling not shy or awkward because I had a partner showing me the moves.' Later that night, Sapan told Sai Srujan that he loved him. 'I was expecting a long line of kissing frogs before I found a prince,' says Sapan. 'But I started realizing that I had gotten really lucky.' Sapan graduated in spring of 2023, and the couple moved in together in Boston, where they now reside, that August. They love to entertain, hosting frequent dinner parties with boardgames. 'He brings the dinner and I am the entertainment,' says Sapan, who now works as a management consultant. Sai Srujan (left) and Sapan worked with London-based dance instructors Ayesha and Mansha Gupta via Zoom to choreograph their first Sangeet performance as husbands. captures They both wanted to propose — they discussed rings together, but planned for surprises. In December 2024, during a holiday visit to Sapan's sister's New Jersey home, he presented a ring to Sai Srujan. Advertisement 'I did my whole speech, and he's like, 'OK, wait, I'm gonna get my ring,' Sapan says. They both said 'yes.' Sapan, 31, and Sai Srujan, 33, married on May 25 at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. They had already tied the knot in a March civil ceremony at Cambridge City Hall. But the May wedding incorporated cultural traditions they wanted to share with the community they had built in Boston. For their ceremony, the couple changed into sparkling suits by Barabas. captures The evening featured a sangeet ceremony with seven group performances by friends and family, culminating with the grooms. The couple are fans of drag performance and they tapped They exchanged I do's before 84 guests. Sapan surprised his groom with two versions of his vows: one in English, another in Telugu for Sai Srujan's mother. '[My mother] doesn't understand a lot of English or Gujarati,' says Sai Srujan, whose native language is Telugu. 'I was bawling, my mom was bawling, my dad was bawling.' There was a Gujarati curry, Telugu food, and a macaron tower from Le Macaron. Dinner was by The newlyweds had a 'really tight budget' and planned the wedding themselves. They worried the Etsy decor they bought might look 'makeshift," but 15 friends arrived that morning to hang billowing drapes and set out lanterns and flowers around Advertisement Sai Srujan (left) and Sapan officially wed on the anniversary of their first date at Cambridge City Hall with a small group of close friends as witnesses, followed by brunch. captures 'We were absolutely blown away by how beautiful and brilliant it looked,' says Sapan. 'I've come out of [our wedding] with so much gratitude for the people around us.' In their three years together, Sai Srujan's parents came to embrace their son's partner and relationship. But he believes it was a shared belief that marriage is a lifelong union that helped them move forward as a family. 'The assurance of companionship is what made [my parents] feel much better and much happier for me,' says Sai Srujan. 'I would take that over anything else. ... my parents are everything to me. I am so happy that I got to share this moment with [Sapan], and my parents were witness to that.' Read more from , The Boston Globe's new weddings column. Rachel Kim Raczka is a writer and editor in Boston. She can be reached at
New York Times
21 minutes ago
- New York Times
What we learned from Netflix's SEC football documentary, ‘Any Given Saturday'
These appeared to be the final days of the Billy Napier era at Florida. So much so that a Gator fan can be heard yelling 'Bye, Billy,' as the beleaguered coach walked off the field following a loss last October to Texas A&M. An awkward moment caught by a Netflix camera crew, which was still filming minutes later when Napier addressed his team in the locker room. Advertisement 'It's critical that we stick together. It's going to be hell out there,' Napier tells his players, pointing at the walls. 'It's going to be hell on the outside. Do not allow them to divide us.' This was one of several locker room scenes caught by Netflix cameras, who followed around a majority of SEC teams last year. There is South Carolina coach Shane Beamer, after a close loss to LSU, telling his team, 'we let their ass off the hook.' There is Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea, in his pregame speech before an upset of Auburn, claiming he overheard an Auburn coach tell his players, 'they're still Vanderbilt and we're still Auburn.' 'Think about that s—!' Lea shouts at his players. 'This is absolutely about earning some goddamn respect.' And in quieter moments, there is Arkansas coach Sam Pittman talking frankly about a game being important to keep his job. There is Beamer's wife, Emily, saying she doesn't like to leave the house and face people in the community after a loss. And the cameras are on inside LSU coach Brian Kelly's car as he talks with his agent Trace Armstrong, who also represents Garrett Nussmeier, about whether the LSU QB should turn pro. 'Interesting world we live in,' Kelly tells someone off-camera after the call ends. 'He's my agent. But he's representing players that are on my team.' SEC Football: Any Given Saturday, a Netflix Sports series offering an exclusive look at key matchups throughout the SEC season, premieres August 5. Witness the unparalleled pressure, commitment, and raw emotion it takes to be a D1 football player in college football's leading… — Netflix (@netflix) July 14, 2025 Netflix has scored hits with sports documentaries going behind the scenes on Formula One, the PGA Tour and the NFL in recent years, among others. Now college football gets its turn: 'Any Given Saturday' is available on Netflix starting Aug. 5, with a seven-episode run that covers the 2024 season through an SEC lens. Advertisement Formula One gained popularity in the U.S. after 'Drive to Survive' debuted in 2019. Paul Martin, the English executive producer for Box to Box Films, which produced both 'Drive to Survive' and 'Any Given Saturday,' was asked if they were aiming to do the reverse this time, bringing college football to a worldwide audience. 'I think the truth of it is when we're making these shows, I try not to think about who the audience is going to be,' Martin said. 'As we never did on Formula One, we never sat down and said, 'Hey, can we do a show that really introduces the sport to an American audience. We just went out and we made what we thought was the best show possible, and hopefully people get on board with that and see that and agree that they like it. We certainly want to keep the SEC fans happy. It would be great if new fans come in.' SEC coaches are notorious for their secrecy, and six of the conference's biggest brands — Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Ole Miss, Missouri and Oklahoma — chose not to let Netflix film them. The series does suffer from not having those big brands. Tennessee was the only College Football Playoff participant that allowed Netflix to film, and its presence seems tacked-on, making only a late appearance in the final episode. But the series does have compelling moments. South Carolina and Vanderbilt, which had the two most surprising, feel-good seasons, are prominently featured. Napier's escape from the hot seat — at least for one year — is well chronicled in the second episode. So is Florida's quarterback switch from Graham Mertz to DJ Lagway — and Mertz let Netflix cameras come in the room as he prepared for ACL surgery. 'You're the first person to ever shave my leg,' Mertz tells a nurse technician. The show, released as preseason practice before 2025 begins, may be about the 2024 season, but most of the players featured are back, including Lagway, Nussmeier, South Carolina QB LaNorris Sellers, Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia, Auburn WR Cam Coleman and LSU LB Whit Weeks. And with no SEC head coaches being fired last season, all the coaches are back, too. The episodes delve into how close some came to not being back. Pittman, speaking before Arkansas faced then-No. 5 Tennessee last October, is frank about his job status, if not for him, for people like his administrative assistant, Izzy Dunn. 'I want to decide when I want to walk out of here. Because I don't want these people in this building getting fired,' Pittman says. 'The head coach gets $10, $15 million to get fired. That lady out there (Dunn), she gets nothing. Two weeks (severance). So this week feels like a really big game.' Advertisement Arkansas ends up getting the win, which is a shared focus of the third episode — along with Vanderbilt's upset of Alabama. That was a lucky break for the show, which had to be choosy about where it went and happened to have a crew there for that game. The production had four separate pods of crews, spread around the SEC footprint. They couldn't be everywhere with all 10 teams, so they had to be strategic with games and practices. There's a lot that didn't make the cut, and some teams (such as Kentucky) hardly got airtime. Recognizable college football personalities — Paul Finebaum, Andy Staples and Alyssa Lang — serve to set the scene. There's plenty of football; the camera shots are mostly via the sideline, so it's not just television replays. But the on-field action comprises a small part of the series. And lest it seem pure SEC propaganda, the first episode homes in on LSU losing to Southern California, and the second episode opens with Florida losing to Miami. The latter sets up the story of Napier's seeming fall, with Gator fans clamoring for Lagway to start, and Napier eventually pulling out of it. 'Credit to Florida, when you would fully expect them to shut down, because they were under so much pressure internally and externally, they let us keep the cameras rolling,' Martin said. Martin described himself as a longtime Miami Dolphins fan and had lived in Los Angeles. So American football wasn't foreign to him, but he had 'never really gotten into college football,' he said. A contact at Creative Artists Agency, who was a 'Drive to Survive' fan, suggested Martin do a college football documentary. When Martin said he wouldn't know where to start, CAA suggested the SEC, which used CAA to sell its media rights. An introduction was made to SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, with discussions beginning in the summer of 2023. They went to an athletic director's meeting in North Carolina, and then a coaches meeting in Birmingham, Ala., along with Netflix officials, presenting the vision to the coaches. Advertisement The filming was done quietly, with Netflix and the SEC not officially announcing the deal until after the season. 'I mean, it was great,' said Taurean York, a linebacker at Texas A&M who was filmed with his family eating Thanksgiving dinner. 'The crew ran it the right way. They mic'd you up for practice. They watched practice. They had you doing stuff after practice with them. They just want to see what it was like to be a Division I football player.' Pavia, the Vanderbilt quarterback, is one of the brash co-stars of the show, dishing out one-liners about Auburn coach Hugh Freeze ('He had an opportunity to recruit me. But he didn't') and Alabama ('I know it's Alabama and they got six first-rounders. Well I'm a first-rounder in my mind. You've gotta be a little psychotic, you know what I mean?') But Pavia is, in one scene, dinged by one of his teammates. During a film session, an unidentified teammate playfully — maybe — tells him: 'You don't do s— at practice. You sit and practice and run around and talk s—.' When Pavia asks about run plays, the teammate says: 'Those are fake rushes. We don't use those in the game.' In another episode, Texas A&M and Mississippi State are featured leading into rivalry games against Texas and Ole Miss. Both games go the wrong way for the team Netflix featured. That's a theme: This is not a series meant to highlight just the winners. It's also a byproduct of the winning teams not participating, another reason some of the season's biggest games — Georgia-Texas, Georgia-Alabama — are not in the series. 'You never get everyone in the first season,' Martin said. 'For whatever reason, some people just want to see what it's going to look like. Some people feel like, 'hey, listen, I might win this thing this year, and I don't want any distractions.' And we fully respect anyone's decision to be in it or not.' Yes, Martin said 'first season.' And if it returns for a second, it would likely be the SEC. That makes the response to the series intriguing: Does the series do so well that Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Ole Miss and Missouri feel like they missed out? Another season, and a shot at more programs, would produce even more compelling stories. 'Hopefully we'll get to do some more,' Martin said. 'You've got to find an audience for it. But I think the audience will be there.' (Top photo of Napier: James Gilbert / Getty Images for ONIT)
Washington Post
37 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Trump weighed in on Sydney Sweeney ad, and American Eagle's stock soared
President Donald Trump on Monday weighed in on clothing brand American Eagle's provocative new ad campaign, praising its star, Sydney Sweeney, in remarks that appeared to boost the company's stock price. 'If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic,' Trump told reporters after learning of the 'White Lotus' and 'Euphoria' actor's political party affiliation. He later commented on the controversial ad campaign a second time on Truth Social, praising it for not being 'woke.' The denim ad, which features the blond-haired, blue-eyed actor with the catchphrase 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,' ignited a flurry of online criticism. Some said its apparent wordplay on 'genes' promoted eugenics, a discredited theory that humanity can be improved through selective breeding. Ahead of the ad's launch, the company had told trade media outlets that it was 'definitely going to push buttons' with its 'clever, even provocative language,' according to the Associated Press, although American Eagle has since tried to play down the controversy. In a statement posted to its Instagram account on Friday, American Eagle said the ad campaign 'is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We'll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.' American Eagle stock closed up more than 20 percent on Monday following Trump's remarks. Trump's comments were far from the first time he has weighed in on a controversy that had little to do with his office. While his predecessors were often loath to discuss hot-button topics, the president has eagerly embraced — and amplified — culture war issues on social media. His Truth Social post indicated that he sensed a political opportunity in the controversy. 'Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the 'HOTTEST' ad out there. It's for American Eagle, and the jeans are 'flying off the shelves,'' his post began. 'Go get 'em Sydney!' Sweeney, who has not yet responded publicly to the ad criticism, appears to be registered as a Republican in Florida, where state records show someone with her name and birth date. Trump went on to criticize Jaguar and Bud Lite, claiming the companies had faced setbacks after woke ads backfired. 'The tide has seriously turned,' he continued. 'Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be.' Trump's broader 'anti-woke' agenda has included efforts to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal government and to reshape the country's arts and cultural landscape. That has included a major overhaul of the Kennedy F. Center for the Performing Arts, drastic cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a March executive order to 'restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.' Within a few hours of Trump's remarks on the American Eagle campaign Monday, others in his administration had followed suit. The defense secretary 'has great jeans,' an official Defense Department account posted on X above a picture of Pete Hegseth wearing blue jeans. It didn't say which brand.
